Walk into a courtroom in 2050 and the first thing you feel is the absence of that ancestral shiver which once accompanied the words “My Lord.” The air is lighter, no one trembles. The judge isn’t glaring from a raised fortress of teak wood. She is 35, drinks chamomile between hearings and asks counsel if they need a moment to collect their thoughts.

The old jurisprudential regime, built on fear and formality, appears to have thinned. Authority now seems to emerge less from intimidation and more from comprehension, a quiet departure from decades when decorum meant suppressing your pulse rate.

Now, judgment looks different. For generations, decisions resembled elaborate academic puzzles - 200 pages long, fortified with Latin and sturdy enough to function as paperweights in colonial archives. Gen Z judges, raised on the tyranny of character limits, have no patience for such gothic excess. The law doesn’t lose rigour; it gains accessibility. A major verdict last year declared, “Right to disconnect equals dignity. Employers can’t ping u @ 11 pm. Period.” For once, litigants can actually read their own judgment.

Inside and outside, the canteen has undergone its own transformation. What used to be a sanctuary of samosas now hosts acai bowls, oats in ethically sourced jars and amla shots that taste like moral courage. Arguments unfold over chia pudding. A junior counsel argues that Article 21 must include “digital detox hours,” while a senior partner insists on the antioxidant properties of amla as a metaphor for resilience. It is unclear whether jurisprudence is improving, but everyone certainly has better gut health.

Advocacy has shed some of its older theatrics. The era of thunderous cross-examinations designed to frighten witnesses into metaphysical confusion appears to be receding. Gen Z lawyers do not roar; they persuade. They interrogate with the gentleness of therapists and the precision of coders. Memes occasionally surface in arguments, not as jokes but as cultural shorthand, compressing complex social truths into recognisable frames.

Transparency, long considered a dangerous extravagance, is beginning to look like an administrative default. Judges release draft judgments in limited beta forms, inviting amicus comments before the final upload. Clerks live-tweet hearings with hashtags like #JusticeInProgress and #BenchCam. Even the Registry experiments with publishing processing times in real time, briefly alarming the Bar before being reluctantly accepted as democratic hygiene. Yet, this openness is not uncontested. Concerns about performative justice and the transformation of judicial reasoning into public spectacle persist beneath the fervour, reminding us that visibility, like power, is inherently ambivalent.

This apparently efficient ecosystem rests on an uncomfortable truth: there are fewer fresh disputes than before. Arbitration panels resolve matters with such ruthless efficiency that civil litigation has nearly gone extinct. Half the pending cases on the old docket closed not with judgments but with obituaries. Parties had died. Lawyers had retired or reinvented themselves as legal influencers. The disputes themselves had lost all earthly relevance. The system now treats those relics as ailments from a previous era, slowly healing as it clears the debris of bygone grievances.

The profession’s internal hierarchies have shifted as well. Seniors no longer treat juniors as unpaid sherpas destined to climb mountains of photocopying in exchange for “exposure.” Gen Z seniors pay, sometimes even on time. Juniors, equipped with self-worth and the courage to post revolutionary hashtags, no longer tolerate exploitation disguised as mentorship.

The judiciary, then, hasn’t merely modernised; it seems to be acquiring a personality. Whether this development is a triumph of democratic maturity or simply a change in aesthetic remains unsettled. But one thing is certain - the age of trembling before the Bench is over. The republic has replaced fear with feelings, verbosity with clarity and secrecy with a kind of cheerful public audit. Perhaps justice was always meant to be serious. Gen Z simply decided it didn’t have to be grim.

Isha R is a second year law student.